In eight towns in Colorado, the federal government is running an Abstinence Education Program to promote chastity amongst teenagers. These programs take tax dollarsa little over a half a million bucks a year for five years here in Coloradoand use them to buy written promises from teenagers that they will remain virgins until marriage. In return for signing the pledge and agreeing to take the message to other young people, these teens are rewarded with swing dance and Tao Kwon Do lessons, laser tag sessions and overnight camp outings. You even get a membership card.
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The program is a result of the 1996 welfare reform law and is scheduled to run until 2002.nbsp; Should the U.S. Congress and President Clinton really be the ones who define appropriate standards of sexual behavior
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In George Orwell#39;s novel 1984, George Orwells female character wears the scarlet sash of the junior anti-sex league and sex outside of marriage is punished by the police.nbsp; In Orwells words, the sex instinct created a world of its own outside the control of the state.nbsp; Therefore sex and sexuality had to be quashed and the pent up. Sexual energy was re-directed, through workshops and educational rallies, towards advancing ideas of the Party.
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If you think the Orwellian comparison a bit extreme, consider the following section of the government#39;s definition of an abstinence program: teaches that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity.nbsp; It is stunningly arrogant on the part of politicians to set an expected government standard for something as amazingly complex and systemic- not to mention none of their damn business- as human sexual activity, especially the confusing and powerful blossoming sexuality of adolescents. (I still vaguely recall mine).nbsp;
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This official government definition of appropriate sex also rings hollow given the track record for fidelity among elected officials.nbsp; No word from the White House whether Bill Clinton#39;s inappropriate contacts with Monica Lewinsky qualify as a human sexual act. And no word from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich whether the speaker#39;s adulterous relationship which led to the breakup of his second marriage is qualifies as a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage. President Clinton and Speaker Gingrich were having their extramarital dalliances during the very same year (as well as various other years) in which they started spending tax dollars to tell teenagers that extramarital sex was immoral.
This is a piece of social engineering whereby those teenagers who conduct themselves as politicians deem fit are rewarded with handouts from the government goody bag and have their esteem validated not by parents and friends but by the state. Those who do not go along with federal sex standards get nothing, except a suggestion that they are somehow less worthy than their fellows.
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This is the same use of coercion and divisiveness routinely practiced by elected know it alls.nbsp; In our Byzantine tax code there are sundry number of tax credits reserved for those who conduct themselves as the government deems fit.nbsp; Your reward for compliance is a tax credit of some kind, while those who do not behave themselves are punished by having to dole out more tax dollars than their fellow citizens.
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Abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage may well be the appropriate expected standard for all school age children. But this standard should be by parents, peer groups and churches who do so out of love, concern and deeply held beliefs. Sex standards attached to tax dollars handed down from politicians falls into the category of control and coercion–not to mention hypocrisy.
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The federal sex program is required to have as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity.nbsp;nbsp; What happens when young people experiment with their sexuality and find that (with proper precautions) sex does not leave them deranged, dying of some dread disease or cast out of societynbsp; They discover they have been lied to. Just like they have been lied to in drug and alcohol education programs whose exaggerations fool only naive fifth graders.nbsp;
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Value judgments on teen sex and sexuality are best left to the mores of families, communities.nbsp; The government#39;s only legitimate role regarding sex is to protect people from sex crimes such as rape.
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There are eight definitions of sexuality and abstinence attached to this program.nbsp; Which is eight more than our elected leaders have the moral authority to impose. Politicians such as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich lack the personal integrity to lead by example. Unwilling to control their own impulses, they settle for using federal money to try control other people#39;s impulses instead. Nothing in the Constitution gives Congress and the President the slightest authority to use federal money to tell people when or how to have sex. But some politicians are just as ready to break theirnbsp; oaths to uphold the Constitution as they are to break their marriage vows.
Mike Krause wrote this article for the Independence Institute, a think tank in Golden which studies education and welfare policy, https://i2i.org.
This article, from the Independence Institute staff, fellows and research network, is offered for your use at no charge. Independence Feature Syndicate articles are published for educational purposes only, and the authors speak for themselves. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an attempt to influence any election or legislative action.
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According to the GrassRoots Activist Kit, Monday is often a slow news day and may work to your advantageAttracting television and getting a good picture in the newspaper depend on good visuals.[1] Asking other organizations to join in the event may make it easier to create a local campaignParticipants could includea non-profit recycling center, which no doubt explains why Eco-Cycle representatives were also on hand.
The fact that only non-profit recycling groups need apply just goes to show that most environmental activists are still so ill informed that they consider profit a synonym for pollution. Why else have a Dirty Jobs Boycott encouraging students to turn down jobs from companies environmental activists add to their hit lists based solely on whether they meet one-dimensional recycling criteria Given that activist notions of responsibility generally require recycling regardless of whether it increases total energy consumption, food waste, or land use, companies can be forgiven for taking a more global view of the matter.
Businesses motivated by profit probably do more to reduce waste than all of the non-profits combined. In 1998, the North American steel indust
ry recycled about 13 million tons of scrap from automobiles alone, about 97% of the total amount of steel used in United States automobile production.[2]
Customers facing price increases have the nasty habit of searching for other suppliers, finding other ways to achieve the same result, or deciding to do without a product entirely when prices go up. This means that most businesses cannot raise prices at will, and it leaves managements no alternative to raising profits by cutting costs. Vast sums are spent on engineering ways to reduce waste, figuring out ways to sell it, or reconfiguring production processes to use fewer materials inputs.
Unfortunately, the ill-considered, heavy-handed, regulation favored by uninformed activists tends to do more to impede industrial recycling than to promote it. In one example in a 1995 Scientific American article, Robert Frosch noted that processes to protect automobiles from corrosion create a wastewater rich in zinc.[3] Automobile manufacturers used to treat the wastewater and sell the sludge to a smelter that recovered the zinc. Unfortunately, the more heavily regulated a hazardous substance is, the less likely it is to be recycled. Eventually wastewater regulatory requirements became so intractable that the smelter could no longer take the sludge. Since then, the zinc has ended up in a landfill.
Coca-Cola and other food processing companies do their part by continually searching for food packaging that maximizes product freshness and shelf life while being inexpensive, convenient, and easy to ship. Minimizing cost contributes to resource conservation, because materials prices signal resource scarcity. American manufacturers are so successful that American households produce one-third less garbage than Mexican households.[4] When Americans want orange juice, they buy only the juice. Coca-Cola and other juice producers squeeze oranges in central locations, ship just the juice, and sell the leftover pulp and skin for animal feed, orange extracts, and flavoring oils. In Mexico, consumers are more likely to buy whole oranges and squeeze them. The skin and pulp are thrown away.
It may not be worth the energy to attempt to recycle single serving plastic Coca-Cola bottles. It may not be worth the spoilage to serve all Coca-Cola in multiple serving packages, and it may not be worth the energy to package everything in glass. Only those who understand the prevailing prices and engineering tradeoffs know for sure. Students who really want to help are busy learning to design and implement less resource intensive ways to support human life, not dressing up like Coke bottles in meaningless demonstrations.
The Coke bottle masquerade probably also shows just what mandatory student activities fees buy. Local SEAC chapters with significant school funding like the Boulder group, which gets at least $.25 per student per semester, pay significant dues to the national group. It has offices in Philadelphia and includes ECOnference 2000, which was held in Philadelphia, on its official events calendar. The Coca-Cola boycott press release listed an ECOnference 2000 functionary as a contact.
SEAC describes its agenda as supporting animal rights, fighting racism, classism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, and militarism.[5] A 1995 multiregional SEAC conference expose[ed] the links between racism, poverty, and environmental pollution. As part of the price of a diploma, the University of Colorado requires that every student pay a fee to support this frankly political agenda.
Free speech, anyone
Notes:
[1] Coke–Take it Back Media Events Checklist, GrassRoots Recycling Network, Atlanta, Georgia. As posted on the web on 16 November 1999. http://www.grrn.org/mediaevents.html.
[2] Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries–Scrap Specs, Statistics, and Technical Info web page as of 15 November 1999. http://www.isri.org/viewpage.cfmpgname=3.11. See also the Steel Recycling Institute web pages Fact Sheet and Recycling Scrapped Automobiles as of 15 November 1999. http://www.recycle-steel.org.
[3] Robert A. Frosch. 1995. The Industrial Ecology of the 21st Century, Scientific American, 273(3), p. 178-81. Quoted in Pierre Desrochers, September 1999. The Secret Past of Resource Recovery, PERC Reports. Bozeman, Montana: Political Economy Research Center. As posted on the web 16 November 1999. http://www.perc.org/recypast.htm, p. 3.
[4] William Rathje and Cullen Murphy. 1992. Rubbish The Archaeology of Garbage. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, p. 217. Quoted in Michael Sanera and Jane S. Shaw. 1996. Facts Not Fear: A Parent#39;s Guide to Teaching Children About the Environment. Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing.
[5] Campus Jobs Boycott Targets Coca-Cola, October 15, 1999. Atlanta, Georgia: GrassRoots Recycling Network. http://www.grrn.org/jobsboycott.html for press release. See SEAC web page for conference calendar, http://www.seac.org/calendar.html, and What is SEAC, http://www.weac.org/about.html, for agenda. See PSN List Archives for the Ecology amp; Social Justice in the Western U.S. Conference notice, http://burn.ucsd.edu/~archive/psnlist/1995.Jan/0048.html. All web citations as of 15 November 1999.
Linda Gorman is a Senior Fellow with the Independence Institute, a free-market think tank in Golden, Colorado, https://i2i.org. This article originally appeared in the Colorado Daily (Boulder), for which Linda Gorman is a regular columnist.
This article, from the Independence Institute staff, fellows and research network, is offered for your use at no charge. Independence Feature Syndicate articles are published for educational purposes only, and the authors speak for themselves. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an attempt to influence any election or legislative action.
Please send comments to Editorial Coordinator, Independence Institute, 14142 Denver West Pkwy., suite 185, Golden, CO 80401 Phone 303-279-6536 (fax) 303-279-4176 (email)webmaster@i2i.org
Copyright 1999 Independence Institute
